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Also this issue: God Is in the Details Black Power Players Munakata Shiko Turning Point Send in the Clowns |
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July 25-31, 2002
theater
The TempestThrough Aug. 9, Arcadia Shakespeare Festival, 450 S. Easton Rd., Glenside, 215-572-2112
If you’re going to start a new Shakespeare festival where there are already two, and if you’re going to present The Tempest in your opening season, and if you’re going to forgo fancy stage effects (Flying by Foy, etc., etc.), it behooves you to trust this lush, complex play and find some fine actors to give us the gorgeous language. This is exactly what director David Bassuk has done, and the results are impressive.
The plot is an odd one; The Tempest takes up Shakespeare's interest in kingship and places all the power politics -- the usurpations, the betrayals, the greed, the ambition -- in the past; the remnants of those immense world-altering passions are couched in minor characters who are buffoons and venal fools. In other words, the conventional plot is over before the play begins. And that means that Shakespeare wrote a play -- generally believed to be his last -- in which there is no suspense.
Prospero (David Howey) rules an enchanted island on which he and his baby daughter were shipwrecked 12 years earlier; he is more a wizard than a king, and he rules over Ariel (Ahren Potratz) and Caliban (Edward Snyder), two of the many spirits who do his bidding. The play begins when Prospero conjures up a storm to wreck a ship on which are his wicked brother who stole the throne of Milan from him and sent him adrift to die, the King of Naples and his son Ferdinand, as well as an assortment of noblemen, sailors and servants. Prospero's motives are multiple: He wants a husband for Miranda, now 15 -- the love-at-first-sight between Ferdinand and Miranda is another kind of magic. But Prospero also wants to confront his brother and triumph over him by forgiving him; he wants his kingdom back; he wants to return to the real world; he wants to relinquish the magical powers he has wielded all these years. And there is never a doubt that all will happen as he plans.
And because he is a merciful as well as a just man, Prospero will, at last, grant the gossamer, "tricksy spirit" Ariel his freedom, and, in an act of larger, finer generosity, will free the repulsive Caliban as well. It is in this acceptance of both the light and the dark that the grandeur of the human is realized.
No one else in the cast reaches the level achieved by the leading actors. Paul Nolan as the king recites his lines rhythmically, as though speaking a memorized foreign language; Mariah Robinson is a lovely-looking Miranda but lacks both clarity of diction and the joyful radical innocence necessary to the character; Jared Delaney's Ferdinand seems to be a jokey, modern guy -- there is no sense of the womanizing courtier suddenly swept away by love.
Although it would be wonderful to have an evenly accomplished cast, it is enough to have three fine actors in the crucial roles. Potratz's Ariel seems an embodied rarified principle -- he has no affect, no personality; he is not human. Snyder's Caliban is astonishingly saurian in fascinating makeup; he achieves his most powerful effects with weird wiggly finger gestures and a grating, high, thin voice. The challenge of Caliban is to make him both sympathetic and loathsome, and this challenge is well met. And Howey's Prospero is splendid; he delivers the poetry as passionate, completely internalized human speech, making the character visible with tiny facial gestures, interpreting Prospero's quick reversals as both lapses of memory and as self-division.
These three intensely different and thrillingly capable actors create a textured Tempest driven by character rather than by effects, and thus this is far more interesting and satisfying than a production in which the techies are the stars.
